How Drivers Are Finally Outfoxing Uber

When Ibraheem Ibraheem signed up to drive for Uber in 2014, it was as a side gig while he earned a computer science degree at New York City’s Brooklyn College. He never thought of himself as the kind of guy who, 18 months in, would be sitting across the room from Uber management, angrily telling them they were in “a race to the bottom to see who’s going to bleed out financially first.” It was June 2016, and six months earlier, the 33-year-old’s relatively easy side hustle had turned into something significantly more demanding when Uber cut fares in New York City by 15 percent. Frustrated drivers had protested outside of Uber’s offices and called for a strike on Super Bowl Sunday — but nothing had changed.

Then Ibraheem heard about a group claiming to have a solution to the brewing unrest. A coalition of drivers, helmed by the Machinists Union, was offering to help drivers assert some rights — appeal deactivation on the app, for instance, or access group health insurance and low-cost legal services. The Independent Drivers Guild, as it was called, had struck a deal with Uber, convincing the company to recognize and even help fund the Guild’s existence. Most tantalizing to drivers, Uber had agreed to monthly meetings with the Guild, where drivers could air their grievances directly to New York management.

But there was a tradeoff: The deal with Uber stipulated that the Machinists not attempt to unionize drivers for five years. Skeptics saw that as a deal with the devil. The head of the city’s taxi drivers’ union, Bhairavi Desai, said at the time that it was “nothing short of surrender — and it’s the worse kind of surrender.”

Any corporate involvement in a labor movement like the Guild is anathema to traditional organizers, who see independence as critical. Desai’s union has gone so far as to accuse Uber of creating a “company union” — an employer-influenced organization that’s illegal under US labor law. But Uber, which did not comment for this piece, has a history of fighting anything that sniffs of worker rights. In Seattle, for example, it’s sued the city over legislation that would allow drivers to unionize. While that landmark law languishes in court, New York’s Guild is positioning itself as a more efficient alternative.

The Guild’s deal with Uber has had unexpected consequences that have ended up empowering the group, making the Guild the most effective tool to date for wrangling compromises from Uber. In its first year it won a fare increase and several new options to make driving less onerous. And through the Guild’s work, the crown jewel of concessions — forcing Uber to let passengers tip drivers within the app — has a strong chance of coming through.

In this particular deal, the loser might for once be Uber.

The timing of the Guild’s launch was no coincidence. When the Machinists first approached Uber with the idea in the fall of 2015, the company appeared unmoved, according to Guild founder Jim Conigliaro, Jr. But after a fare cut in early 2016, tensions between Uber and its New York drivers reached an all-time high. Suddenly, the startup was all ears.

“I think they realized that they had a driver issue,” says Conigliaro. “I think [they] saw us as a group that could fix some of those issues, and bring some voice to the drivers.”

In a number of areas, Uber has proven willing to listen. It’s agreed t0 the Guild’s requests to raise its minimum fare in New York City by $1; allow drivers of more expensive, luxury vehicles to opt out of low-cost Uber Pools; and add a “destination filter” to the app, allowing drivers on their way home to pick up rides that won’t take them drastically out of their way.

But there was one issue where Uber wouldn’t budge. At its very first meeting with the Guild last June, the topic drivers most wanted to discuss was in-app tipping. It was then that Ibraheem lobbed his criticism at the reps present, telling them they had a moral obligation to help drivers earn a living wage.

That meeting went nowhere, as did the next meeting on the matter. So the Guild changed tactics. As a result of its original deal with Uber, the Guild received the email address of every active Uber driver in the city—meaning that today, it wields a powerful mailing list of some 50,000 drivers. Through that email list, the Guild independently collected the phone numbers of tens of thousands of drivers who opted in to receive alerts and polls via text; still more communication happens in groups on WhatsApp and Slack. That’s an unprecedented level of organization for a dispersed workforce that’s virtually never assembled in one location. With those tools in hand, the Guild had the power mobilize many thousands of drivers to join forces and pressure the company through alternate means. And that’s exactly what it did.

The Guild launched a petition for in-app tipping that racked up over 11,000 signatures. Guild members distributed bar napkins that read, “It’s easy to tip your bartender, why does Uber make it so hard to #tipyourdriver?” Drivers were given stickers that they could display in their vehicles, declaring that “Tips Are Appreciated.” The Guild produced a series of videos asking viewers to imagine if customers gave delivery workers or bartenders five gold stars in place of a tip.

The campaign culminated in a petition to New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission — the regulatory administration that oversees the city’s taxi and for-hire vehicle drivers — to add a citywide rule that would mandate in-app tipping. Though the TLC hasn’t voted on the rule yet, it has accepted the Guild’s petition, and, according to a spokesperson, believes it’s “the appropriate way to move forward.”

By the Guild’s calculations, in-app tipping will allow drivers who work at least 30 hours a week to make between $8,000 and $12,000 more a year, and Conigliaro doesn’t hesitate to let his imagination run wild with those numbers: “So goes NYC goes the rest of the country — we could see a billion-dollar diversion of money back to drivers.”

That might be true — if the Guild’s New York trajectory can be repeated elsewhere in the country. That’s a big if. New York City is particularly supportive of workers’ rights, notes Catherine Fisk, the Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Irvine Law School. That’s why the Guild has so far seen success in leaning on city agencies like the TLC as proxies for its agenda. Says Fisk, “that might work in New York, but it might not work somewhere where the local government is not particularly interested in labor problems.”

The ongoing stalemate in Seattle also suggests there’s plenty of fight left in the rideshare giants. David Rolf, president of Seattle’s Service Employees International Union and an advocate for innovation in the labor movement, is particularly scathing on this point: “The level of technologically enhanced and psychologically modeled union busting that a company like Uber could be capable of makes Jackson Lewis and the old-school union busters look like leeches and bloodletting compared to laser surgery.”

Meanwhile, the Guild is charging ahead with its demands for reforms. In addition to petitioning the TLC to mandate in-app tipping, the Guild has begun pushing for the installation of a bathroom for drivers at JFK Airport, and it’s thrown its support behind a City Council bill that would create a portable benefits fund for taxi and for-hire vehicle drivers. Next, it will campaign for a citywide minimum per minute/per mile rate that could force Uber to raise its current fares.

The Guild hasn’t completely given up on partnering with Uber. As part of the deal struck last year, the Machinists are helping the startup lobby New York’s state legislature to lower the tax on black car rides so that it’s equal with the surcharge applied to yellow taxi rides. If they’re successful, the money saved will go toward setting up a benefits fund for drivers. But Conigliaro hopes to move toward independence from Uber—and as the Guild accumulates more dues-paying members, it seems likely that it will eventually be able to sever its financial ties to the startup.

Fisk predicts that drivers are reaching a turning point with the companies that pay their bills—and not just in New York. “Historically, revolutions of one kind or another happen periodically when people feel sufficiently beaten down and feel like the system isn’t working for them,” she says. “It’s just a question of at what point drivers or cities are going to be sufficiently alarmed about this to say, ‘We need to do something.’”

The most telling outcome will be what happens around the Guild’s quest for in-app tipping. The much-desired feature is uniquely loathed by CEO Travis Kalanick. But Uber doesn’t have the best track record against New York’s TLC, which previously required Uber to have all of its New York drivers officially licensed with the regulatory agency.

If the company is forced to implement in-app tipping in one part of the country, it’ll be significantly harder to deny it to other markets. For drivers, that’s a huge victory. New York’s Independent Drivers Guild might not have all the trappings of an old-school union—but as traditional jobs shift to a less empowered gig economy, it might be just what workers need.